The Search for Social Harmony at Harvard Business School, 1919–1942

Abstract

Abstract In the mid-1920s, Wallace Donham, the dean of Harvard Business School, recruited two intellectuals, Elton Mayo and Lawrence Henderson, to find solutions to the nation's ills. Like many intellectuals since the late 1800s, Donham, Mayo, and Henderson believed that laissez-faire modernization and competitive individualism had shattered the social bonds that had once harmonized the nation. Corporations, they believed, thus should use a new science of administration to tie workers into close-knit workgroups. These bonds would fulfill workers’ needs for stability and community, discipline workers’ wayward emotions and thoughts, and diminish workers’ susceptibility to labor activism and radical politics. Historians have shown that a vein of intellectuals turned the common “progressive” faith in social bonds into an argument for the strong state. This article shows, however, that this faith also contributed to conservative thought and tools of control.